14April2017

Tips for great photos

Everyone dreams of having a beautiful ceremony, exciting reception, touching toasts, and of course beautiful photos on their wedding day. While nothing will every go exactly to plan there's a lot of ways to help keep things running smoothly. This is obviously going to be coming from the perspective of a photographer so I'm sure your caterers, planners, DJ/band will have different and ultimately just as important advice for you but here's my short list.

Today I'll be focusing on one of the few things that you have no control over, the weather.

Expectations

I live in Texas. If you're not familiar with Texas weather, don't worry neither are we. The weather here is not only unpredictable but also consists of all extremes. Some times it will rain for months other times it won't rain for what seems like years. And don't get me started on how hot or cold it can get in the same day.

The reason I bring this up under expectations is because it's one of the most obvious areas that tempering your expectations will prevent you from being disappointed on your wedding day. Realize when your planning your wedding a year in advance that the beautiful, green pasture land that will be in the background of your entire wedding could be suffering from a severe drought by the time of your wedding. Even if you schedule your wedding for deep into the almost non existent fall months in Texas it's possible to be caught in a heat wave and now your sweating out your dress or tux.

Tempering your expectations obviously extends to more areas than just the weather but releasing yourself from trying to control things that are out of your control is probably the easiest and first step to reducing your stress and allowing yourself to enjoy planning your wedding and taking the experience in on the day of your wedding.

Plans

Since I just mentioned planning it's a great time to talk about weather planning. Outdoor weddings are very popular and can be absolutely beautiful, however they do require a fair amount of planning to ensure that they come off well.

The first thing to remember is tat you're never going to be able to predict the weather completely. You can have a pretty good idea of what it's going to be like but even a morning that starts out great could end in rain by evening or vice versa. Since you can't control the weather it's important to plan for the weather in several ways.

The biggest concern I normally see if you're expecting hot weather is taking care of family. If you are going to have elderly guests it's especially important to be aware of their sensitivities to the weather. The last thing anyone wants is their grandmother sitting in the blistering heat for an hour or more. The best ways I've seen people deal with this is by having somewhere for the grandparents to wait until right before the ceremony starts. Having somewhere that's air conditioned goes a long way to reducing the time they spend out in the heat.

Also of note is rain. If you're planning an outdoor wedding somewhere other than a desert, there's the possibility of rain. I'm also sure that some of us are even lucky enough to get rained on in the desert but only if we plan our wedding there. Either way I recommend having a rain plan. Having some alternative to outdoors is always good and even if you don't have to use it at least you'll have that stress off your plate as you're coming up to your wedding.

I'm sure there's lots more weather related topics I could go into but I'm going to try to keep these short as I've been accused of being a bit too verbose. I hope this has helped and look for more tidbits in future posts.